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John Latta

CRITICISM’S BACK

Screwball comedy of the avant-

Imminent: that’s my dress code.

The bloody robin’s egg blue

Uniform of the impersonal is

Something I maintain, removing my

Necktie with obvious care, thus.

My adversary’s got official hagiographies

On the side he tags

Symboliste, laughing through the haschische

Smoke, autonomous as any entity

Existing solely on dispensations of

Sentiment, currency, and raw bravado.

A precise purpose, that’s it.

Contraption like a biscuit tin.

Or a tin biscuit. Hectic

Cohesions dismissed as late marginal,

Like those languid beauties come

Across in salons, all for

The dismal flight-taking inherent

In any boom of coherence.

Think of a nest of

Polyhedrons, convergence as assertion’s door

Out of order, rock steady

To induce an accommodating disarray

In the ever-galant muse.

It merits an heroic love.

And a means of whiting-

Out the customary sad flower

Metaphor, the there’s gonna be

Trouble noise outside reception’s bandwidth.

THEORIES OF VISUAL PERCEPTION

A range of stimuli implausibly

Coy or a pawnshop shut

For the usual unkempt reasons.

Hair parted Republican-style, proprietary

Indecision and its deafening I

Mean deadening umbilicus of torts.

Two notions of the fertile:

Barren and complacent or foreign

And hard to administer to,

Such is the degeneracy of

Experience maddened by adventures in

A spate of relatively uninterrupted

Deletion and purge. Hence our

Shoreless oceans of excitements to

Faith: ‘abide ye with me.’

Here’s a frontispiece penis with

Its several adepts and collaborators:

Ilk of the torn trousers.

Ilk of the ball’d-up

Index. Ilk of a philanthropy

Of snaps and snaps, temperamental

And discrete as pilgrim fathers.

Our dearest companion is supple

With light. Blotter, pen, and

Impiety clouds all in primordial

Origin. And skepticism I am

Sure you are wary of.

NOT EXACTLY AWAKE

The neighbor is out inspecting the wind-

Ow frames for dry rot or paint peel as a

Squad of ballplayers propels itself loose-

Limbed and joking down the street in the new

Morning air. Not they the singular men

Of legend, not they nattering like mag-

Pies in rags, not they the lilac-bewigged

Sojourners in lands without nature or

Name. . . So too adequate visions assail

The general ease, broadcasting leavings

Where arrivals only once were welcome:

A book called Zoo with sepia-toned prints of

Many varieties of African

Antelope, maps of spur tracks heading off

To distant salt-mining reaches of a

Sea-surrounded tongue of Russian steppe, and

Odd anti-governmental bombings of

A Paris where peasants startle awake

In tall tenements to paw the air for

Whatever sustenance absent in love,

Absent in the thin gruel of the air’s

Absenting itself, sucked up out into

Sudden fierce red backdrafts, chaotic scorch.

Pictures trouble our solitary dry

Rapport with the ineffable, the dull.

We consider our own reveries charge

And discharge: strange cargoes wheeled through clean streets.

Not we hesitant and beholden to

God and God’s workers the loose-limbed, not we

Athwart the day, sipping a bracing cup

Of coffee in a panic of stories,

Unpicturable, not one to return

To the neighbor now tossing keys in air,

Waiting for that first coat of paint to dry.

SUDDEN DEPARTURES

When the yucca stalk blazes up white in glad

Shreds of glory and the stone cottage behind

It conspires with the cirrus’d blue of the sky,

A loud coterie

Of stone tumbles like a brute handful of dice

Thrown fraught through scar’d heaven, and one

Hardly adequate consensus makes glib

The oratory

Wherein all things seem innocent in the excellence

Of what is. . . Corner’d by wonderment, you fuss

With the singular arrangement of those blessed

White flowers, those shreds

Of making arbitrary distance a measure

Of where you have been: forty years collecting

Sights as rarefy the gaping air around

Them, cluster’d, beheld.

Or, unavoidably, you get it all wrong,

Spelling out names with haphazard reluctance

Like that of the Grunewald who drove a yellow

School bus, who never

Got out from under the overweight wife who

Sold encyclopedias, who broke the cheap

Davenport, settling into a spiel one blank

Autumn, opening

One volume to illustrate the completeness

Of the entry, or another on weather

With its pleasing mention of the violence

Of the dry simoon.

One could buy the whole set and line them all up

On a long shelf, loving the cream-color of

The bindings, loving the bindings, the bindings,

Loving that that binds.

NOD

Each raindrop pursues it one

Fell intent to make its

Way into the absent visual

Field that becomes a lake

By adding blue, a pigment.

Here a human nod is

A universe. It tumbles out-

Lying cogs into gear, takes

the ‘tenement that Walter Mydnyght

Sometyme held in the parissche

Of Gales’ and deposits it

‘Bitwene the lond of Raaf

Sturdy’ and the telos that

Is feed to any sentence,

Is its evidence, pooling up:

‘& is with-owte date.’

EFFIGY AND ODDITY

Sunk. A plectrum to plunk

Against th’impenetrable plentitude, to torture

Out the ‘dreegs and chaffes’ of

Fable and doctrine, effigy of

Song. And so exhorteth He

We to good workes continval

Mortifying flesshe. ‘Men love

Me with there lyppes and

There heates bee farre off

Me.’ Prayer and mumblings of

Oddity: to lavish slavish attention

On a towardly and pregnant

Soil, the heroic thing is

To persevere in stupid stupidly.

An historic eros is come.

A droplet is pending off.

TRUMPET AND EARWIG

In a woods near Ermenonville

I sliced into a trumpet-

Brassy peach and ate it

Unconcernedly slouch’d against a black

Gangster car. A couple nigh

In rut: two earwigs skitter’d

Under a stone. So tempo

Is the raggedest tender, up-

Scorch of a kind of

Discursive barn-burning, or hand-

Raising, much of it verily

Fictive, though its nouns are

Correct, sauf Ermenonville, as is

Proper. So ‘Love in tonge

Canst last longe,’ the taut

Word is a rotten cord.